When looking into various free and open source CRM solutions, one that consistently outranked the others in terms of reviews and maturity was SuiteCRM. This is for good reason, SuiteCRM is a powerful software, customizable, and best of all, totally committed to the open source model. But there’s a few things we didn’t know getting into it that you probably should before investing a bunch of time into setting it up and customizing it, especially if you are coming from another CMS like WordPress or Joomla.
SuiteCRM is a little “rough around the edges”. There are some things that work in very un-intuitive ways. For example, there are different “content types” provided by various modules including bugs, phone calls, cases, accounts, contacts, etc. Most people will not need most of these modules, but by default they are all installed and enabled. Unlike in a system like Drupal, you cannot selectively disable these modules as they are considered “core modules”. What you must do instead, is head into a dizzying array of menus and sub-panels, disabling the “view” of each module in several different places. You still get the bloat these modules provide but at least you can hide them this way. This seems like a huge design oversight. What should be a one-click enable/disable checkbox is dozens of clicks and several nested levels of pages.
Another issue is that each module comes with a default set of fields. While adding and customizing fields is fairly easy and intuitive, you cannot delete or disable existing fields. Again, you can “hide” them from the “views”, but each entry in your database is still taking up space with fields you absolutely do not need. A perfect example of this is the “Account” content type which has fields for “Shipping Address”, “Billing Address”, and “Address” which are all separate entries. Why would they set it up this way? It’s madness!
Don’t want rich-text in your field? Disabling this would be one checkbox in WordPress or Drupal, but in SuiteCRM you have to actually dive into the code to fix this.
Want to edit the menu order or add or remove menu items? You’ll have to dive into the code for that too. And for some un-explainable reason, Cases don’t have an entry under the “create” menu, nor do many other modules.
There is no way out of the box for a field to have multiple entries. For example, a contact can only have ONE e-mail address.
Despite its mature codebase and many users, there are very few free extensions or themes for SuiteCRM. People coming from Drupal will not find this surprising, but people coming from other CMSes like WordPress or Joomla may. In general, if you are customizing SuiteCRM you are assumed to have a several hundred or thousand dollar budget if not your own in-house web developer. You will find this assumption in their support forum as well. This assumption is not entirely unreasonable, if you have so many customers that you need a system to organize them all, you probably also have enough incoming revenue to invest in that system. The extensions section of the SuiteCRM site is really barebones, you can’t sort by category, price, or really anything at all, making finding the right extension difficult.